Okay ampan, I also don't mind 60 year olds who pretend to know better. Some are right, others dead wrong.
However, I will admit it, you have a point. You certainly might have a weird way to express it in my view, but I'll agree to this much with you: the captain can't be entirely exonerated. He should have been 100% certain of his position before descending below LSALT. Here's a passage found on another forum that made me think that this is what
you are trying to say:
This pilot knew that he would not be visual below the cloud layer. He knew he could only go below MSA on instruments and he knew that the INS was not sufficient. He did not, at the time of his cloud/ice comment, know about the available ground radar facilities, so on receipt of the weather report, he correctly decided to bail out and go somewhere else.The fact that the captain knew he would not be visual below the cloud layer is confirmed by what happened shortly after he decided to go elsewhere, when he was offered a radar-assisted descent. From the captain’s perspective, this changed everything, because he could have his position confirmed before going below MSA. On receipt of the offer, the captain gratefully accepts it and then announces the plan to the passengers. If the captain believed that he would be visual below the cloud layer, the radar would have made no difference, because he could have gone below MSA with or without it. Ten minutes later, without any discussion with the rest of the crew, the captain dived down below MSA through a hole in the cloud layer on the basis that he was visual. He effectively decided to ignore his own warning and that decision has to be the primary cause of the accident. His decision to fly visually when he knew he couldn't see properly was not caused by any mistake made by the navigation section or any inadequecies in the briefing. It was caused by a very bad error that bordered on reckless.
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https://www.erebus.co.nz/Guestbook/F...05/scope/posts)
That being said, let's not forget that mistakes made by the airline by not communicating the change of coordinates were probably a compounding factor here. It's hard if not impossible to ascertain what chain of thoughts Collins had. I still find it hard to imagine that Collins wouldn't have assumed that he was doing his 8 figure over the sound based on the initial waypoints and the radar assist that he was offered. None of this, however, exonerates him from establishing his actual position with 100% certitude before descending below MSA.